Tag: Tennessee Senate race

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Proposed Tennessee Senatorial Debate Gets Quashed

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

For a time, it seemed that there would be one major statewide political debate this year — for U.S. Senate candidates — to be held under the auspices of the NEXSTAR network, which includes WREG-TV News Channel 3, locally.

The debate was scheduled for Wednesday, October 14th, in the studios of WKRN in Nashville.

The NEXSTAR invitation to participants cited a lengthy list of prerequisites, including one that candidates “must have reported, on the most recent official forms filed with the appropriate election authority, accepting at least $50,000 in monetary, as opposed to in-kind, campaign contributions, at least 25 percent of which must be raised from in-state constituents.”

Clearly, Republican Senate nominee Bill Hagerty, who reported upwards of $12 million in receipts on his last filing, in July, easily qualified. Surprise Democratic nominee Marquita Bradshaw of Memphis had reported contributions in the neighborhood of $22,000 as of that reporting date, though presumably she has raised considerably more than $50,000 since, and would have filed reports indicating as much, and would also have qualified to take part in the debate.

Jackson Baker

Reflecting a confidence that the U.S. Postal Service is equal to the task, District 83 state House candidate Jerri Green oversees a postcard-writing party.

Nobody else was even close to the $50,000 threshold. That would include another Memphis candidate, Aaron James, one of nine independents running. Responding to WKRN general manager Tracey Rogers, James cited a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulation requiring that “if a station allows a legally qualified candidate for any public office to use its facilities … it must give equal opportunities to all other candidates for that office to also use the station,” contending also that “the minimum bar for being recognized as an official candidate by the Federal Election Commission is only $5,000.”

Therefore, said James, given the strictures of the two cited federal commissions, he had a right to insist on inclusion; he maintains that he has a campaign fund of at least $5,000, consisting of his own money, and he filed an informal complaint this week regarding his exclusion from the debate.

Then the whole matter has become moot. Rogers announced that the debate event had been called off, and viewers in Memphis and elsewhere in the state will not, after all, have an opportunity to witness an exchange between major-party candidates Hagerty and Bradshaw, much less one involving James or any of the other eight independent candidates.

Bradshaw engaged in an interesting exchange of another kind last week with state Democratic chair Mary Mancini. In an online interview, the Democratic nominee, largely an unknown statewide but a familiar presence in environmentalist ranks, gave this account of her coming of political age:

“Right across the street from my elementary school was a Superfund site. And we didn’t learn about the dangers of this Superfund site until it closed down in 1995. … [T]hat was the year that I gave birth to my son, at the age of 21. I watched my great grandmother die of cancer. And after she died, many people in the community began experiencing sickness and death, also at alarming rates higher than the national average. And so that was when I got involved in a political process beyond voting.”

• In these pandemic times, the number of public assemblies of any kind has been drastically reduced. But on Monday night, there were doubtless many people who wanted to take part in two simultaneous events and had to choose. One was a memorial service at the D’Army Bailey Shelby County Courthouse in honor of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Organized by Assistant County Attorney Jessica Indingaro, it drew numerous legal and political eminences.

Simultaneously, members of the Coalition Get Out the Vote 901 group, including some key Democrats, were participating in a Zoom meeting, co-hosted by state Senator Raumesh Akbari and TaJuan Stout-Mitchell, to discuss pre-election strategies.

In it, local Democratic Party chair  Michael Harris cited District Attorney General Amy Weirich as a target for defeat. That’s called looking ahead. Weirich isn’t up for re-election until 2022.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Looking Ahead to 2020 Elections

The elections of 2020 are just around the corner. Chief interest right now, and likely to remain so for a while, is the race for president, of course. Just under 20 active candidates remain in the Democratic field, and some 12 of them — including newcomer Tom Steyer, he of the billlion-dollar war chest and two years’ worth of pro-impeachment commercials — were holding forth on a nationally televised debate stage in Ohio this week.

President Donald Trump, looking to his re-election, still reigns supreme among Republicans, though he has drawn a surprising number of challengers in his party, including, to date, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, former Congressman and Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, and former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh. It is a bit chancey to call these gents “primary challengers,” though, in that slavishly loyal GOP state organizations are canceling their scheduled 2020 presidential primaries about as fast as these challengers have announced themselves.

Torrey Harris

Statewide, Tennesseans will be eyeing the race to succeed Lamar Alexander, who is retiring from the U.S. Senate. Most attention so far has been focused on the Republican contest between former state economic development commissioner and ambassador to Japan Bill Hagerty, who has what would appear to be an outright endorsement from Trump (who announced Hagerty’s Senate bid) and Manny Sethi, a Nashville physician and author of books on medicine. 

Lest one be skeptical of Sethi’s chances, it should be recalled that former Senator Bill Frist, also of Nashville, managed a similar leap from medicine into politics back in 1994. Ultimately, transplant surgeon Frist would decide he’d had enough of Washington, but he had managed to become Senate Majority Leader before that final change of heart.

A Memphian, Marquita Bradshaw, is the latest declared Democratic candidate for the Senate seat. Bradshaw is a board member of the state Sierra Club and has worked for the American Federation of Government employees and the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center. She joins in the Democratic race James Mackler, the Nashville attorney and Iraq War vet who has been running ever since the close of the 2018 election season.

Mackler, it will be remembered, had declared for the Senate seat vacated last year by Republican Bob Corker but stepped aside to make room for former Governor Phil Bredesen, who lost decisively to the GOP’s Marsha Blackburn. (Incidentally, one signal that the president’s hold over his party could be weakening came last week from Blackburn, a Trump loyalist, who nevertheless made public her serious disagreement with the president’s decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria, leaving the Kurds, American allies, at the mercy of a Turkish invasion. Nashville, as it happens, is the location of the largest number of Kurdish émigrés anywhere in the nation.)

One legislative race in 2020 will be a reprise from 2018. Torrey Harris, a human resources administrator for the Trustee’s office,, will try again to knock off longtime state Representative John DeBerry in District 90. In his previous shot at DeBerry, Harris pulled 40 percent of the primary vote and hopes to improve on that showing this time around.

As before, Harris is pitching his appeal to mainstream Democrats irked at DeBerry’s well-established habit of voting with Republican House members on social legislation. The incumbent’s latest provocation to the regulars was his vote in the House for last session’s education voucher bill, which passed the House by the margin of a single vote.

The bill, a key part of Governor Bill Lee‘s legislative package, was rewritten several times in order to attract enough votes for passage — the last time so as to apply only to Shelby County and Davidson County (Nashville). Ultimately, the bill gained several votes from representatives who were promised that their localities would not be affected by it but was opposed by most legislators from the two counties where it applied.

Harris’ announcement statement said in part: “We need someone fighting for the hard-working people here — that means supporting the push for money for our already underfunded public schools instead of giving it away. … DeBerry could have been the vote that tied up this legislation.” Harris also promised to be “bold about human rights … LGBTQ equality, racial justice, and reproductive health justice.”

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Bredesen Can’t Be GOP-Lite

CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons

There’s talk of a “blue wave” sweeping the country in 2018. It already has elevated Democrats in impossible places such as Alabama and Pennsylvania and scared the likes of Paul Ryan into retirement.

And it is going to graze Tennessee like a fizzling tropical depression. I don’t want it to be true, and I hope I’m wrong. When it comes to Bob Corker’s soon-to-be-vacant U.S. Senate seat, Tennessee has two options: flip it or get used to hearing the words “Senator Marsha Blackburn.” Recent polling has shown Blackburn lagging behind her opponent, former Governor Phil Bredesen, by up to a double-digit margin, prompting behind-the-scenes pleading for Corker to reconsider. Of the 600 registered voters surveyed, more independents said they would pick Bredesen over Blackburn.

Cool. So this strategy of finding the one Democrat who has proven an ability to win a statewide election in Tennessee is working so far. Not my first choice, but keep doing what you’re doing, I guess. How long will it work if he sticks with the message of “There’s no reason the president and I can’t work together?” Just because half the state hasn’t figured out that nobody can work with the guy doesn’t mean their votes are gettable. Trusting Marsha to stick to her proven track record of being The Actual Worst and hoping it all works out seems a little naive.

Wikimedia Commons

Phil Bredesen

The president announced on a Friday night he’d done another little war, and totally not to distract us from the avalanche of scandal that befell him in that particular week, by the way. No dog-wagging here. He doesn’t even like dogs. He’s a germaphobe, okay? I checked Twitter, as I usually do when these things go down, and I swear I heard a TV-show record-scratch sound effect when I read this tweet from Bredesen:

“The President is justified in his actions. The chemical attacks in Syria compel us to act decisively in cooperation with our allies. If the President intends further action, I trust Congress will take up its Constitutional war-making responsibilities. Godspeed to our military.”

I usually abhor articles about other people’s tweets. I think it’s lazy. But I have been stewing about this particular post for days now, and I just have to ask: why? Why tweet this, Phil Bredesen? Who put you up to this? Who even asked? It looks to me as if someone got a little too confident and decided to let that tepid neoliberal flag fly on a Friday night.

If Marsha Blackburn wins the Senate election, it will not be because the people of Tennessee abhor net neutrality and funding disaster relief, and love Blackburn’s folksy brand of Bought and Paid For. It will be because the Democratic candidate let his eagerness to be Reach Across the Aisle Guy overshadow the fact that there is ostensibly a (D) next to his name. “Reaching across the aisle” isn’t a thing anymore. It’s a nice notion, but it doesn’t work when the people on the other side only reach back only to steal your watch.

“Bomb first, explain later” is never a good look. “The president was justified” is not the way to say that. Especially as a Democrat. Especially with this president.

“I trust Congress” should have stayed in the Drafts folder. Nobody trusts Congress. Not even Congress trusts Congress. That’s why Trump didn’t ask for their permission. Even though the majority party has not yet displayed a willingness to defy him, they can’t afford for their war votes to become a talking point when they’re up for re-election.

I’m out of the social media management game for now, but if I worked on the Bredesen campaign, I would have advised staying mum on this and focusing on localized issues. But here’s what he should have said: What Assad is doing is wrong, and we deplore his actions. We turn to violence only as a last resort and in a way that minimizes harm to civilians. The Syrian people need our support, and as your Senator I’ll do my best to ensure any future action is taken with their human rights in mind.

The state of Tennessee ranks in the bottom 10 in education, median household income, and employment rate. We’re top 15 in opioid deaths. There’s plenty of evidence that the people who represent this state in our federal government aren’t fighting for us. Pandering to the people who elected them — the same ones who’d rather die than vote Democrat — won’t get it done.

Jen Clarke is a digital marketing specialist and an unapologetic Memphian.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Weekend Review: Focus on Willie Herenton, Phil Bredesen, and Bob Corker

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

Bredesen, Corker, Herenton

Willie Herenton became an epochal cultural figure upon his election in 1991 as Memphis’ first elected African-American mayor. He went on to run the city for 18 years before retiring under pressure in 2009. He tried a comeback in 2010, with a race for the 9th District Congressional seat, but lost by a 79-to-21 percent margin to Congressman Steve Cohen in the overwhelmingly black district.

Now Herenton is embarked on a new race for mayor in 2019, announced last Thursday in the wake of the MLK50 commemorations in honor of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike and assassination in Memphis of Martin Luther King Jr. Though the former mayor’s announcement engendered real excitement for many of his former supporters, some political observers see his race against Cohen — haphazard, impulsive, underfunded, and ill-prepared — as foreshadowing the likely result of the 78-year-old Herenton’s latest surprise comeback attempt.

Herenton’s declared reason for running again is to “complete the mission” of Dr. King, and the difficulty of his undertaking is amplified by Mayor Jim Strickland’s relatively good 2015 showing among black voters and by Strickland’s success in increasing black business contracts with the city and in removing Confederate war memorials.

Herenton disclosed some of his views in an interview this week with podcaster Brian Clay at Crosstown Concourse: “I had the privilege of marching with Dr. King on two occasions when he came to Memphis, 28 years ago,” said Herenton, then a Memphis city schools principal and later schools superintendent. “I stood in front of City Hall wearing an ‘I Am a Man’ sign. I always had a social conscience. I’m always addressing injustice.”

The former mayor said that “50 years later, I had to look in the mirror again.” He quoted the Socratic axiom: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Herenton added, ”We have become a very, very poor city. … We cannot separate economics from education, history has taught me.” He spoke of “a correlation” between failing schools, failing health care, housing, and numerous other issues.

But Herenton cautioned voters to have “reasonable expectations” and said that, while he could promise to “give the very best managerial skill, vision, and boldness” he had, “no magic wand and could not by himself, cure ‘generational poverty.’” He said, “I’m not going to promise you that poverty is going to go away or that people will stop killing each other.”
The former mayor faulted himself for not having prepared a proper successor during his 18 years as mayor. While making a point of not criticizing the current administration of Strickland, Herenton said he had the “energy and passion now to make some needed changes. It’s a new economy now. … Memphis cannot be a growth city paying people starvation wages.”

In addition to earlier reports in the Flyer, here is additional information on recent appearances and statements in Memphis by former Governor Phil Bredesen and retiring U.S. Senator Bob Corker:

In an interview with the Flyer last week, Bredesen, now a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, made it clear that his middle-of-the-road campaign rhetoric is no accident: “In our state, I need to capture a lot of middle-of-the-road voters — even a few of what I would call economic Republicans.” To that end, the former governor acknowledged he was “not crazy” about the Affordable Care Act, but “it’s on the books, and we’ve got to try to make it work.”

In general, said Bredesen, the Democratic Party has “narrowed too much” and adopted “too many litmus tests. … We have to win if we want to govern again.”

Bredesen theorized about the desirability of having a close working relationship with Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, if elected: “I haven’t talked to Lamar about linking, but he’s a good example of people in both parties who, if they got together, could make a comprehensive start to be a block of 10 or 12 to start to do something. I’d like to be a part of a movement like that.”

Two days later, Alexander announced his support in the Senate race for fellow Republican Marsha Blackburn.

Referring to retiring GOP Senator Bob Corker as “a thought leader in the Senate” and a “straight shooter,” Mayor Strickland introduced Corker at a luncheon meeting of the rotary club of Memphis at Clayborn Temple last week.

Corker said he continued to have disagreements with President Trump, though he hadn’t made a point of emphasizing the fact on each occasion. But, among other things, the Senator declared that the president’s tweeting habit was “very harmful, and he expressed concern about the strong likelihood that Trump intends to abrogate U.S. adherence to the current multinational agreement withholding sanctions on Iran if that nation maintains a freeze on its development of nuclear-weapon capability.

Corker said that Iran could be “off and running” on a nuclear pathway if the agreement ceased to be, and he said a better course than renouncing the agreement would be to seek modification, in tandem with America’s European allies, of the pact’s current 10-year “sunset” provision. Otherwise, he said, it was doubtful that the Europeans would follow Trump’s lead in scrapping the agreement.

“I personally think we’d be better off keeping the agreement in place,” Corker said.
The senator also deplored Congress’ recent passage of a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill but said, “The system works better than you think. … Believe it or not, Washington reflects the country much more fully than you think.”

And he said he’d been “terribly impressed” by the vigor and commitment of the students from Parkland High School who have launched an ongoing national campaign for anti-gun legislation.